Worldviews

This is an approach for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem.

This is an approach for testing objective theories by examining the relationship among variables.

This worldview is sometimes called the scientific method or doing science research.

This philosophical worldview focuses on the needs of groups and individuals in our society that may be marginalized or disenfranchised.

Individual researchers have a freedom of choice.

The basic generation of meaning is always social, arising in and out of interaction with a human community.

The research in this worldview links political and social action to these inequities.

The goal of the research is to rely as much as possible on the participants’ views of the situation being studied.

This worldview believes that truth is what works at the time.

Knowledge is based on careful observation and measurement of the objective reality that exists in the world.

It is not committed to any one system of philosophy and reality.

Laws or theories that govern the world are needed to be tested or verified.

Inquirers generate or inductively develop a theory or pattern of meaning.

It uses a program theory of beliefs about how a program works and why the problems of oppression, domination, and power relationships exist.

Instead of focusing on methods, researchers emphasize the research problem and use all approaches available to understand the problem.